Lance Armstrong gets no tears for his phony remorse

Lance Armstrong may be testing the limits of the public’s willingness to forgive. Just as he challenged the boundaries of the physically possible, with an incredible seven victories in the Tour de France, Armstrong is now pushing the envelope in public compassion as he finally admits his career was all based on cheating.

According to carefully choreographed leaks from his interview with TV’s top sob sister, Oprah Winfrey, Armstrong on Monday admitted what he has fervently and angrily denied for years: that he used performance enhancing drugs during his racing career.

The leak comes from someone “who spoke on condition of anonymity”, supposedly to avoid usurping the scheduled broadcast Thursday on Winfrey’s network. Armstrong’s admission, we’re told, “came hours after an emotional apology by Armstrong to the Livestrong charity that he founded and took global on the strength of his celebrity as a cancer survivor who came back to win one of sport’s most grueling events.”

It’s easy to see why you’d get choked up at this, but not out of any sense of sorrow or compassion for Armstrong. If anything, the entire episode suggests he remains primarily concerned with his own benefit, as he was throughout his career. In this instance he is receiving an important assist from Winfrey, who has her own gains to be made.

Since she retired as the first lady of the tearful interview, Winfrey has been struggling to draw viewers to her network. Without Oprah, however, interest in the Oprah network tailed off, requiring that she return in some fashion. A giant “get” like the Armstrong interview is just the thing.

Armstrong confessed to doping during an interview with Oprah Winfrey taped Monday, just a couple of hours after a wrenching apology to staff at the Livestrong charity he founded and has now been forced to surrender.

The emotional day ended with 2 1/2 hours of questions from Winfrey at a downtown Austin hotel, where she said the world’s most famous cyclist was “forthcoming” as she asked him in detail about doping allegations that followed him throughout his seven Tour de France victories.

Her culpability, however, remains well in the rear of Armstrong’s own. The cyclist is not the only athlete who continued to deny drug allegations long after fans accepted they were true. Though Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens were two of the greatest ballplayers of their era, both were tainted by drug allegations and received a very public snubbing last week when they were rejected from entry to the Baseball Hall of Fame. But Armstrong may have the title for most vociferous insistence on his innocence in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Legions of former friends, teammates and colleagues offered testimony against him, while the head of the U.S. anti-doping agency described his cheating as “the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen.”

Still, he denied it, breaking friendships and heaping abuse on critics. After being stripped of his Tour de France titles, he released a photo of himself relaxing on a couch surrounded by his seven framed victory jerseys. Remorseful? Not Lance Armstrong.

Now, at last, he has decided to come clean, apparently because he wants something out of it: He’s reportedly hoping for a reduction in the lifetime ban from athletic competitions. If that doesn’t undermine the sincerity of his apology, we’re informed that, after his tearful appearance before his Livestrong audience, Armstrong “later huddled with almost a dozen people before stepping into a room set up at a downtown Austin hotel for the interview. The group included close friends and advisers, two of his lawyers and Bill Stapleton, his agent, manager and business partner.”

Tiger Woods staged a carefully managed apology after his own fall from grace, which was so obviously artificial that it did him little good

Of course. Because when you want to bare your soul on past sins, confide in the public and apologize to people you’ve spent more than a decade deceiving, the people you want by your side are your advisers, two lawyers, and your agent, manager and business partner.

Tiger Woods staged a carefully managed apology after his own fall from grace, which was so obviously artificial that it did him little good. Golf fans did eventually return, though not in the numbers he’d previously enjoyed. And Woods’s sins were related to his personal life, not to his amazing skill as a golfer. Armstrong is admitting to blatant, wholesale, coordinated contempt for the rules of the sport in which he competed, and serial deception of the people who cheered him on.

He may be expecting too much if he’s looking for forgiveness, Oprah Winfrey or not.